Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 2)

Jerry Melnick: The other challenge in the space is, that’s great if you talk about a single kind of configuration. I purchase a couple of pieces of iron, put my applications on it, and configure it so that it’s all highly available using SIOS Technology. That’s great. If you want to follow the industry trend of moving these applications into virtualization environments to lower cost and increase manageability and flexibility, how do I take advantage to provide the same level of infrastructure availability for foundations.

You don’t want to have to learn how to do it all over again. You don’t want to have to create a whole new way of doing it. You’ve been using these kinds of clustering capabilities of providing critical application services for years. The advantage that we bring is that without changing your operational environment, skill sets, and applications, you can extend what you used to do on these servers into virtualization and cloud environment. There’s a huge benefit because you can literally forklift, upgrade, get rid of the hardware, and move it to Amazon or Azure.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any kind of specific application or is it all applications?

Jerry Melnick: There are Linux applications and there are Windows applications. They’re typically the back-end database applications. If you think about what that means, SQL Server for instance, people build all types of applications on top of databases. It could be accounting application. They could be payroll applications. I’ll give you some examples of customers and of the kinds of things that people are doing. We’re talking about the flexibility of being able to use this kind of availability software across many different infrastructure platforms.

We have a company in Canada called Epicure. They had an onsite website server that allowed customers to come in and order food. It was sort of a marketplace for very exotic food. They realized that if they lose that web server, orders will stop. They could just have a backup. If the server goes down, they could put up a new server and they could load the software on it. Before you know it, three of four days later, they would be back up and running. But they realized that’s too expensive. The other alternative was to go ahead and get another facility some place. If their local facility dies and the server dies, they have a DR capability. Of course, that’s very expensive.

What we offered them to do is take that SQL server application and extend their cluster – a second instance of their application – into the Amazon cloud without changing the application. It was just simply buying cloud services from Amazon and building a second app instance of that application so that if there was site failure, they could be back up and running in minutes. It’s a perfect example of how someone has used our software to provide a high-quality of service and use a cloud service as that backend without having to buy all that equipment.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS
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